Quote collection
165 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism."
"We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision."
"I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?"
"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."
"A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years."
"Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life."
"Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness."
"in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night"
"When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred."
"Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation."
"It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying."
"Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash."
"Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."
"I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild."
"There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know."
"I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone."
"Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!"
"Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health."
"America, why are your libraries full of tears?"